True Friends Or Not Quotes

“Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?”

— Osamu Dazai

“What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer ... "Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

— David Nicholls

“I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptised.”

— Lance Armstrong

“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.
Best friends are formed by time.
Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.
If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.
However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.
Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”

— Vera Nazarian

“True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.”

— Ben Jonson

“Is it not enough to shine,
To know that friends are true?
That love is born of friendship,
And who you are is you?”

— Frederic M. Perrin

“One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

“Indians abroad tend to stick together. They join Indian clubs, regularly visit mosques, temples and gurdwaras and eat Indian food at home or in Indian restaurants. Very rarely do they mix with the English on the same terms as they do with their own countrymen. This kind of island-ghetto existence feeds on stereotypes - the English are very reserved; they do not invite outsiders to their homes because they regard their homes as their castles; English women are frigid, etc. I discovered that none of this was true. In the years that followed, I made closer friends with English men and women than I did with Indians. I lived in dozens of English homes and shared their family problems. And I discovered to my delight that nothing was further from the truth that the canard that English women are frigid.”

— Khushwant Singh

“You do remember my brothers?" Anthony queried politely. "Benedict and Colin. Benedict I'm sure you recall from Eton. He was the one who dogged our footsteps for three months when he first arrived."
"Not true!" Benedict said with a laugh.
"I don't know if you've met Colin, actually," Anthony continued. "He was probably too young to have crossed your path."
"Pleased to meet you," Colin said jovially.
Simon noted the rascally glint in the young man's green eyes and couldn't help but smile in return.
"Anthony here has said such insulting things about you," Colin continued, his grin growing quite wicked, "that I know we're sure to be great friends."
Anthony rolled his eyes. "I'm certain you can understand why my mother is convinced that Colin will be the first of her children to drive her to insanity."
Colin said, "I pride myself on it, actually.”

— Julia Quinn

“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine.”

— John Fowles

“How would she fill the days? She had no idea. The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.”

— David Nicholls

“'Friends' started because Rachel left her husband at the altar. This likability factor is just so stupid to me. It's the same thing as 'wish-fulfillment,' which is a big word you hear in a lot of Hollywood rooms. It basically means that people want to see other people living a life they can't lead, and I don't buy that. I think that's not true.”

— Adam Pally

“I had no one before Rose. No true friends. No family, not really.
Now I have her. I have people I care about. People that I want to protect.
Now I have everything.
The only thing about having everything is that you can lose it all.”

— Krista Ritchie

“Truth provides the most diplomatic answer): I don't believe I've ever attended one since I was your age where I didn't feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment.”

— Samuel R. Delany

“As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I was eight years old when I realized that my G.I. Joe and Optimus Prime were more than friends," I told her. "Theirs was a forbidden love that dared not speak its name."
"Optimus Prime is a robot," Jenny said. "Humans and robots can't be in love."
"Oh," Sandy groaned. "You shouldn't have said that."
"Blasphemy!" I hissed at her.
"It's true!" she insisted.
"I hope you never have children," I snapped.”

— T.J. Klune

“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives. A”

— Carol S. Dweck

“I mostly eat healthy. I just do. I'm not a vegan for health reasons - although obviously I'm 20 pounds lighter than when I started. I stayed 20 pounds lighter. I feel better. My friends say I look better. All that's true. But I'm a vegan for compassionate reasons.”

— Russell Simmons

“When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn't want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn't having chicken with my older brother and me: "I don't want to hurt anything." [ ... ] What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which point I had to change my life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“So I don't really have much rivalry, or if there is any, I don't really know anything about it. Because, you know, I'm not around girls like that. The friends I have in the business, I'm always really happy for them. I think we're always happy for each other. That sounds crap, but it's true.”

— Emily Blunt

“Dear Friends: As one who has experimented extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“He was a devoted follower of the teachings of Epicurus - "that pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily" - although I hasten to add that he was an Epicurean not in the commonly misunderstood sense, as a seeker after luxury, but in the true meaning, as a pursuer of what the Greeks call ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. He consequently avoided arguments and unpleasantness of any kind (needless to say, he was unmarried) and desired only to contemplate philosophy by day and dine by night with his cultured friends. He”

— Robert Harris

“If you were not cast into the abyss, you would have never groped, reached as far as you could reach, to grasp for anything that you could possibly touch, anything that you could possibly feel brushing against your fingertips! Funny how in the darkness, we come to find the things that we never saw before all the lights departed! It's like someone needed to turn the lights out, to make us find all the things that we never looked for when the lights were on! And it's in that blackness that we wake up to the true light! My friends, curse not the darkness! It has given you many things!”

— C. JoyBell C.

“I chose life over death for myself and my friends ... I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.”

— Ernest Shackleton

“If you know the psychological nature of your own mind, depression is spontaneously dispelled; instead of being enemies and strangers, all living beings become your friends. The narrow mind rejects; wisdom accepts. Check your own mind to see whether or not this is true.”

— Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

“I'm just competitive. Everybody always says, 'You've gotta be crazy to do what you do.' It's not really true. Everything I do is always about trying to out-do your friends. Trying to one-up, be a little faster, a little better, jump a little further.”

— Travis Pastrana

“I got the bad press and the blogging and the email threats because people really didn't understand. They thought I was anti-gay. That's not true at all. My spiritual mom has a gay son. Even he was telling his friends "No, that's not true. She's so accepting of me." That doesn't mean I accept his lifestyle. It means I accept him as a human person and as a creation of God and a person of value.”

— Patricia Mauceri

“My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help.”

— Paul Johnson

“We all have our own paths. That's the important thing of this movie. God's waiting there for everybody. Be true to who you are and true to your values - not to media, not to the influence of friends necessarily or people even that you admire. Be true to your heart and you'll find that path.”

— Corbin Bernsen

“Are science and Christianity friends? The answer to that is an emphatic yes, for any true science will be perfectly compatible with the truths we know by God's revelation. But this science is not naturalistic, while modern science usually is.”

— Albert Mohler

“Good advice is priceless. Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Not imaginary, but practical. Not based on fear, but on possibility. Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better. Seek it out and embrace the true friends that care enough to risk sharing it. I'm not sure what takes more guts-giving it or getting it.”

— Seth Godin

“Yet sighes, deare sighes, indeeds true friends you are
That do not leave your left friend at the wurst,
But, as you with my breast, I oft have nurst
So, gratefull now, you waite upon my care.”

— Philip Sidney

“I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”

— Charles Darwin

“If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way.”

— Dale Carnegie

“Worse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and true.”

— L. Neil Smith

“Why not simply honor your parents, love your children, help your brothers and sisters, be faithful to your friends, care for your mate with devotion, complete your work cooperatively and joyfully, assume responsibility for problems, practice virtue without first demanding it of others, understand the highest truths yet retain an ordinary manner? That would be true clarity, true simplicity, true mastery.”

— Laozi